Don't know if either of you have read Flieger's A Question of Time, but in that work she devotes a great deal of time examining Tolkien's use of dreams in his stories. They seem to be of two kinds: there are 'symbolic' dreams - like Sam's in the 'Crossroads' chapter we've recently been discussing, & then there are dreams in which the dreamer enters another 'deeper' kind of reality - like Frodo's dream in the House of Bombadil, or Merry's dream in the Barrow. The first kind are 'subjective', what Jung would call 'little' dreams, the others are 'objective', 'big' dreams.
Tolkien's use of dreams in his 'time travel' stories, Lost Road & Notion Club Papers (where his ideas on the nature of dream probably find their fullest expression) is especially interesting, as the characters enter into the minds of people from the past in their dreams.
From this poin tof view, it doesn't really matter whether Smith 'dreamed' his adventures in Faerie, as Faerie would be another
reality, & the
means by which he enters - Fay Star or 'dream'- are less important than what happens once he gets there. There's an interesting discussion in Notion Club Papers on 'scientifiction' (ie 'sci-fi') & the methods used to get characters to other planets. One of the characters claims he finds spaceships unconvincing as a means to get to another world, & prefers dream (if I remember it right). He also suggests (& it is perhaps
suggestive in more ways than one) that one way of getting a character to another world is 'incarnation' - ie, they could be
born into that world.
Like
LMP I've always been more moved by Smith than by the Sil. In some ways Smith affects me more deeply than even LotR. There is a sense with Smith that I've only just missed that world, that things were like that not so very long ago. With LotR, The Sill & The Hobbit there's a sense "Of old, (unhappy?), far-off things,. And battles long ago;. - not the perfect quote for what I mean, but I hope you pick up on what I'm getting at. Middle earth has long since passed away, & so there is that sense of
Quote:
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like looking through a spyglass at something real but remote
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But with Smith its almost as if the world of that story has only very recently passed away, that if only I'd been born a few years earlier I would have lived there myself. That makes it more poignant for me - I feel like I
just missed that 'train'....